Why This Yale Professor Says Job Interviews Are Useless [Video]

Job interviews have become one of the essential steps in the job application process. This step can either make or break the applicant's chance of bagging the job or not. For those who dread job interviews, they have an ally in a Yale professor who said job interviews are useless.

Jason Dana, an assistant professor of management and marketing at the Yale School of Management, wrote in an article on The New York Times said job interviews are useless because interviewers reveal more about themselves than the person they interview.

His observation was not just taken out-of-the-blue but has been backed by a lot of scientific evidence over the years. One example was a study made in 1979 regarding the 50 rejected students at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.

That time the Texas Legislature required the school to add 50 more students but after the interview phase, the 50 candidates were rejected. When a team of researchers looked into the data of the students and the ones who were accepted, they found out that all of them have the same abilities in the same areas. That means the interviewers had not clearly made any relevance to the application process.

Dana and his colleagues also made a research to see if they would get the same or different results than previous studies. The process involved students interviewing another group of students and predict what their future performance are in school. One group only based their predictions on the interview while the other group based it on the previous GPA scores of the students. It turned out the GPA scores are more accurate indicators compared to the ones based only on the interview.

Since interviews are unreliable, Dana suggested that interviews should be structured where all the applicants receive the same questions and ask about job-related skills rather than personal questions which are considered counter-productive.